


Seesaw

by Anonymous



Category: DRAMAtical Murder (Visual Novel)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-13
Updated: 2015-02-13
Packaged: 2018-03-08 05:50:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3197789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ren's year spent in convalescence: some introductions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seesaw

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eemamminy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eemamminy/gifts).



At first Ren tells himself they're medical checkups. Aoba had peeled his Allmate chassis open every few weeks, after all, and his hand buried beneath Ren's fur meant intimacy no more than Aoba soaping and scrubbing under Tae's good-natured harassment meant Aoba had an intimate relationship with their bidet. It was only necessary to—move around inside. The dreams he lives in for months after they cripple Oval Tower are more chaste, and more piercing for that: he has Aoba's chest at his back, or forehead at his forehead; he lies on Aoba's pillow, his body angled to put cloth and stuffing between his ears and the tinny static leaking from Aoba's headphones, made to feel truly tiny by the happiness that fell across him hour after hour, molten and inexhaustible, warming him like afternoon light. 

_You have the worst protective mechanisms, you dumbshit,_ says the other Aoba who occasionally visits these dreams. _Being stripped open isn't a cue to pretend it isn't happening by escaping to some sappy fantasy._ But he lingers anyway, scuffing at the walls of the room.

It's a gloved hand over his ribs, at first. Ren's eyes are closed, he doesn't know who it is, and he barely feels it anyway compared to the vertigo that presses him into the hospital bed whenever he wakes. Parts of the bed are elevated and lowered to arch his spine. Someone splays his fingers and taps his thumb with a hammer, then the soft backs of his knees, then his tongue, then the rubber sinks to near his throat until the spoon-wide handle braces against the inside of his teeth. He coughs. A scrape over his tonsil cracks open his eyes.

His view is a blur. Instinctively trying to use the focusing function wired into Allmate eyes rewards him with a showy ruffle of blond hair and tie knotted high up on his caretaker's neck. _Virus_ , he thinks. Knowing what else he expects to see gets his eyes to cooperate—his sight locks onto the man's features, his smile and brows and eyes bright as ice.

"Sei," Virus says, with the multisyllabic release of breath that in Aoba means wonder, "you're looking..." and then he nods and something knocks Ren unconscious.

The next time Ren wakes up it's to a finger in his ass.

He opens his mouth, but someone stifles him with his palm. Trip, he realizes, in a jolt of sense-memory that doesn't feel like his own. The knuckles resting over his throat are Trip's too. It's Virus kneeling between his legs, one leg swept outward to pin Ren's toes under his sneaker and tie let loose to tickle Ren's chest, and it hits Ren that he maneuvered Aoba and his hungry affinity for danger from latching onto Virus and Trip as teenagers; it can't be the superimposition of Aoba's memories over his that supplies him with the sensation of that tie neatly looping around his neck. It's Sei reacting to Virus and Trip. It's Sei who understands what Virus is doing enough to scoot his hips forward and widen his knees, who is having this physical reaction to being prodded open Ren only recognizes at distant secondhand from Aoba and drunk encounters in back rooms—

Ren burrows into his consciousness. _Sei_ , he calls, trying to curb his panic. Surely if enough of Sei remains to pass Ren his visions, he can also let Ren hear his voice, he can allow Ren to remain the third (or fourth) wheel he ought to have remained—

 _You shouldn't stay here_. There's a click from even deeper down like a flipped switch, and a pale shape appears suspended in a tank, nose scrunched against the glass. _I'm sorry, brother, I can only hold myself back for so long..._

 _You're alive_ , Ren says, although his joy is cut short by some movement from Virus up in the world above them that draws a noise out of his body Ren doesn't want to think about. _Please, come with me, I don't know what they want—_

The glass is splintering. _They were always kind to me_ , says Sei, and then the liquid spills through a crack and the Sei-figure splits into a hundred tessellated shapes that wink out of visibility, here and there, until any sense of awareness Ren got from him leaks away like a sieve. Waves lap up against Ren's feet, carry him up and up, and deposit him back on the bed and its rippled sheets.

"Huh. He's back with us." 

"Yes, I think so."

Trip's hand has moved to cradle Ren's head. They're waiting for him to speak. "... thank you for waiting for me," he says, hoping he sounds at all like Sei.

"We're always happy to give Sei-san time," says Virus. His fingers spread open, still thrust inside Ren, and Ren bites down on his lip and wishes he knew how Sei would ask for time to prepare for an act he can't deny is curling his toes into Virus' shoe sole, now that he's been barred from the mental well he once escaped to and fully seated in a body that reacts with pleasure to its own imprisonment.

*

Ren's so close to sleep he can practically see it coming to take him away to his dreams when Trip starts talking again, hardly muffled by the sheets over Ren's head. "Ren enjoyed that experiment."

"I think Ren-san will be amenable to future experiments as well."

Ren can't tell himself he's angry or disappointed, even, not with the remains of what Virus and Trip did to him—or what Ren did with their support, remembering how genuinely Sei had said _kind_ before sending Ren back up to deal with them, still crusting on his skin. "You knew I was Ren," he says, and finds himself unable to blame Sei, either. At least he's learned this afternoon that he cannot be mistaken for Sei. Perhaps he's also distinct enough from Aoba and other-Aoba to—to—

He can't articulate it before Trip hauls him out from under the covers.

"Of course we know about Ren-san," Virus says. "We collect everything about Aoba-san, and about Sei-san too. But we would love—" Trip squeezes Ren's shoulder, which could be reassuring if it weren't forcing him to turn and face Virus' impenetrable stare—"to explore who Ren-san _is_."

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, recipient of fantastic taste in DMMd ships, for the chance to write for you. I'm very sorry this fic didn't turn out as well as I'd have liked-- I hope you still have a lovely Valentine's Day!


End file.
